The influence of the subject context of an ethically charged situation and the background of an educational and professional group on the application of a moral prohibition

Context and relevance. The inclusion of the subject context of an ethically charged situation and the background of the group as variables determining the application of a moral prohibition allows us to establish a link between moral decisions and previous experience and reveal the substantive specifics of identifying, structuring and resolving moral contradictions in an ethically ambiguous situation. This formulation of the problem calls for a revision of the tradition established in moral psychology in the study of moral prohibition as a general predisposition to follow universal values in their judgments and behavior.
Objective. To substantiate the role of contextual variables within realistic scenarios of the moral prohibition, taking into account the criteria of its application, and to establish how these criteria manifest themselves in conditions of both unilateral and joint influence such as ethically loaded situations and the background of an educational and professional group.
Research design. The article analyzes the peculiarities of the application of moral prohibition in an ethically burdened situation by students belonging to different educational and professional groups (“lawyers”, “doctors”, “teachers”). The significance of the influence of different types of subject contexts of situations (professionally labeled, professionally neutral, and everyday) on the variance of indicators of imperativeness, completeness, reasonableness, and consistency in the application of moral prohibition by representatives of these groups is assessed.
Participants. The study was conducted at K.E. Tsiolkovsky Moscow State University on a sample of students from three educational and professional groups (“lawyers”, “doctors”, “teachers”). Total – 195 people, 137 girls and 58 boys, age M = 20,02; SD = 1,34.
Methods. Situational methodology “Decision-making in an ethically burdened situation”, which includes 12 situations with a subject-professional (law, medicine) and everyday context of the application of moral prohibition.
Results. The dissonance between the imperative of applying a moral prohibition and its reasonableness in professionally intimate (“lawyers”) and everyday (“educators”) contexts is revealed. “Doctors” applied more mature moral reasoning in medical situations, “lawyers” in situations “close” to themselves (law), on the contrary, resorted to arguments of a socially conventional nature. The compared groups differ in the selective use of criteria of moral prohibition: “doctors” showed less willingness to strictly follow the moral prohibition, which resulted in lower consistency compared to other groups; “lawyers” increased the consistency of the application of the prohibition with increasing imperativeness of their decision. It is established that the moderators of such variability are the background of the group and the subject context of the situation: the background affects the imperative of the moral prohibition and the completeness of the description of the moral contradiction, whereas the context of ethically loaded situations affects only the reasonableness. At the same time, the background of the group and the context of the situation do not interact in a meaningful way during the application of the moral prohibition.
Conclusions. The application of the moral prohibition is due to both the different subject context of situations and the background of educational and professional groups, namely, their experience of orientation and reasoning in the meaningfully relevant context of professionally labeled situations.